The Gaming of Violence

Published: April 30, 1999

What Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold saw as they made their murderous way through Columbine High School last week looked nothing like the images they saw while playing the video game called Doom. Instead of heavily armed, square-chinned men and prognathous monsters roaming a fortress set in a vaguely Asiatic mountain range, the two teen-agers saw ordinary students lying prostrate in the blandly over-lit hallways and classrooms of a modern American high school. How that hideous reality compared to the fantasy of Doom in the minds of those two boys is impossible to judge.

The search for cause in the Littleton shootings continues, and much of it has come to focus on violent video games. Every human, adolescent or adult, entertains fantasies of one kind or another. What makes them fantasies is the recognition, reinforced every passing day, that the world does not bend to our wishes. But as entertainment technology advances, it becomes easier to act out computer-simulated, virtual versions of the stereotyped fantasies our culture markets so well. Something provided a conduit of sorts between the fantasies Mr. Harris and Mr. Klebold indulged and the reality they forced upon their classmates. For several reasons, suspicion points to video games.

As violent as they are, games like Doom and Doom II and Quake are also relentlessly first-person. The screen portrays the player's field of view, and the only visual token of the player's identity is the gun barrel that protrudes into the bottom of the frame. In most of these games, the setting and the violence are inherently unrealistic. What is realistic, in a nightmarish way, is the sense of rushed three-dimensional movement and the shift in skill levels that occurs as a child plays more and more. After a few hours of Doom, a child isn't virtually more skillful at pointing and shooting, he is actually more skillful. As a player improves, he is rewarded by an increase in the level of violence.

What is truly alarming is the kind of fantasy these games embody. Normally when children indulge their fantasies, they tend to animate not only themselves but also the world around them. They dramatize it and bring it to life, sharing the stage with the personae they create. That is one important step toward understanding the psychological reality of other human beings. But the fantasy embodied in video games is a narcissistic fantasy of rage. The psychology it profiles is brutally simple: an armed first-person actor in a hostile world full of completely dehumanized targets. This is a fantasy that inevitably prevents the player from personifying his assailants, which is why it has worked so well as a form of military training. The danger lies in the way video games channel and limit imagination as well as in their apparent violence.

On psychologically vulnerable children, it seems plain that such games must wreak a kind of havoc, reinforcing their isolation and fortifying their anger. Still, most children who play violent video games do not go on to murder their classmates. Nor, in a nation full of real guns, is banning virtual violence likely to put an end to school shootings. Oddly, those who categorically blame violent video games for the murders at Columbine High School risk making the same mistake they accuse adolescents of making -- confusing fantasy and reality. Not every fantasy, no matter how violent, is a sign of sober intent.